Hope&Glory

Top 150 position 131 | Fee income £1,356,000 | Growth 120% | Staff 21

Hope & Glory: Campaign for O2 featured walkie talkies made out of old shoes

Hope & Glory is one of a collection of successful consumer PR agencies that has launched in the past three years.

The agency’s 2013 figures show why it is creating a buzz in the industry.

Part of Hope&Glory’s 120 per cent increase in fee income can be explained by the sizeable account landed from O2 towards the end of 2012. The mobile operator asked the agency to increase talkability around its core products. This account led to some of its best work of 2013, including recycling mobile phones and old shoes to create walkie talkies, and creating ‘thumbells’ – fitness weights for thumbs – to help consumers keep up with the faster speeds of O2’s new 4G service.

The agency attracted other big-name clients such as Ikea, the Royal Mint, Sony, HTC and the Big Bang Fair in 2013.

James Gordon-Macintosh and Jo Carr of Fishburn-owned 77PR fame spent 2013 trying to make the agency’s growth sust­ainable."A lot of new agencies chase new business and forget their clients, which is idiocy, or don’t invest in their day-to-day management, which restricts growth," says Gordon-Macintosh.

The pair strengthened its day-to-day management by hiring a trio of senior staff from Mischief, Cake and Threepipe. They also rebalanced the client portfolio to ensure no client was worth more than 20 per cent of its fee income.

The agency’s access to Lansons’ back-office functions allows all its staff to be client-facing (Lansons has a 30 per cent stake in the business).